1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus for recognizing characters and a barcode and a method for controlling the same, and more particularly, to a mobile communication terminal having a camera module for capturing characters and a bar code and a method for recognizing characters and a barcode received from the camera module.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the increased use of mobile communication terminals, various services are being provided through the display of the mobile communication terminal, including traffic information services that notify a driver of road conditions during driving, ring tone services that enable a user-specific ring tone sound to be registered and used, and mobile call notification services that alert a user of arrival of a voice message in a voice mail box via text. By providing a number of additional services such as voice mail functionality or special information reception functionality through service providers, mobile communication terminals increase user convenience beyond the traditional call functionality.
Recent mobile communication terminals are typically equipped with a camera module for capturing an object and a memory for storing captured images. Therefore, a user captures an intended scene using a mobile communication terminal. In addition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is under active development, as a technology that recognizes characters or a barcode included in a captured image. Specifically, two-dimensional barcodes including more information than conventional one-dimensional barcodes have been developed and increasingly used. Thus, a user captures an image including characters and a barcode using a camera module of a mobile communication terminal and acquire specific information by recognition of the characters and barcode included in the image.
However, conventional methods for recognizing characters and a barcode such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,311,256 are limited in simultaneously recognizing characters and a barcode, when both the characters and the barcode appear in an image. That is, according to the conventional character and barcode recognition method, character-only scanning and barcode-only scanning are performed separately for one image. As a result, it takes a long time to acquire information from the entire image.
Further, a high-resolution image is used to recognize characters, whereas a low-resolution image is used to recognize a barcode. If both characters and a barcode are recognized from a single high-resolution image, it may take an excessive amount of time to recognize the barcode or barcode recognition may fail in many cases.